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Marty Heyman's blog

The Death-Star Platforms vs Co-operation meme is the latest soap-box for the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, academic/punditry division. Uber and AirBnB disintermediate the taxi and hotel industies. They are cold-blooded, VC funded extractive businesses. But we must not misunderstand the re;atove value of their "platform" (the software) in their business model.

The Guardian ran an “article” by Paul Mason entitled The End of Capitalism Has Begun. A great deal of the message resonates with the GEO Collective’s core beliefs and we certainly aren’t interested in denying the potential value of democratically organized, worker/member directed initiatives, institutions, and enterprises.

This was the first time I could get away to attend an Advancing Development of Workplace Democracy (ADWC III) and the Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy (ECWD 2015). It was a very rewarding trip. Josh Davis, Content Editor for GEO flew in a day early and we travelled up and back together.

I've been meaning to write something that lets me use that picture for weeks now. It's from the cover to Fred P. Brooks's The Mythical Man Month and I've always wondered whether these were his mythic beasts or if they were a play on his being a dinosaur in the industry.

Our title is taken from the title of "Today's Must Read" article from my favorite site's list of daily links: Stop Trying to Save the World". The article tells us first to honestly measure what we are trying to achieve when we introduce some vaunted improvement program. Then it tells us that just because the formula within the program that succeeds in the test case, don't assume that it will apply to every other situation.

Was with "the gang" at the New York celebration of Jessica's Cooperative Courage coming to a bookseller near you real soon now. Others have promised to write up the event. Just a couple of dots connected for me from the discussion.

"Democracy" is a complicated idea and difficult ideal to establish as a political, economic, and social objective. Democracy is relatively easy in "the small," groups of under, say, a couple of hundred people who can come together for deliberations. I wonder, however, about scaling Democratic institutions beyond that generally accepted limit of effectiveness.

GEO has posted entries on two stories in the past week with the same underlying story line. The co-op borrows money on the public equity market (sells bonds) and then finds it can't pay the loans back and has to restructure.

The Occupy Money Co-operative is getting NY Times coverage as it works its way to actually issuing pre-paid Visa Cards. Drawing smiley-face points from their association with Occupy Wall Street and the Co-operative movement, the initiative paints a comforting picture. I find two things troubling when I go to the Occupy Money Co-op web-site.

Richard Logie of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, talked about Complementary Currencies at work in Aberdeen at a TED conference in Leeds, UK. I particularly liked his life-history introduction. He claimed they were poor but they didn't actually know it. They had a "favor exchange" and the more you knew how to do, the better off you were. Click through for an embedded player for the video

Over 125 years ago, the Populist Movement launched a third party in the US and their most compelling platform plank was "greenbacks," the elimination of the rigid gold standard and a freeing up of the money supply. Here we are over a century later and Richard Nixon freed us from the last vestiges of Gold in forty years ago and our central Banksters have expanded the money supply at the behest of Presidents and their Bankster allies.

The video embedded in the full story below is a session with David Harvey, a prolific author championing Freedom of the City and David Graeber, the Occupy Activist, Anarchist, Anthropologist. The videw is almost an hour and a half and both authors take substantial time to provide context on both the books and their feelings about #occupy. Harvey's book is Rebel Cities and Graeber's is Debt: The First 5000 Years. There is a lot of good thought and support for co-operative action and power.

Dave Karoly of the NoBAWC staff was kind enough to share his report on the recent White House Co-op Day. We are sharing the report and a couple of the pictures in the longer body of this blog entry. The National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA) coordinated the event and was, from all accounts quite a successful day.

This is the title of a worthwhile article over on openDemocracy.net. Written by Robin Murray, a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics (as opposed to my position as Resident Applied Fool at the Manorhaven School of Hard Knocks?) on the state of the "Global Civil Society" in 2012.

Valve is a Software game development company founded by an alumnus of Microsoft. Self-funded, it has about 300 employees. Its first product came together quickly and paid off handsomely. Most importantly, it has no bosses. It is entirely flat. There have been several write-ups recently about Valve in the mainstream (Capitalist) business press pointing out the "no boss" structure.

The Post Carbon Institute'sEnergy Bulletin just posted an article titled "The Hidden Power of Coops" by Michael Shuman. It is a glowing report with lots of numbers and good words. The segment is a reprint of a piece of the author's book Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Move Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity